Jason Moran moved to New York City when he was 18 years old to pursue his craft and dream of being a jazz pianist. Since then, the Houston-born musician has garnered admiration for his fusion of classical jazz rhythms with modern pop beats. He released his fourth album entitled Ten, with his band, The Bandwagon, in June.

On Tuesday, he was one of 23 people awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant, $500,000 that will be given to him over the next five years to pursue his passion. Speakeasy caught up with Moran to talk about his work, his reaction to winning and his plans for the money.

The Wall Street Journal: As a musician and a performer, how do you approach your art?

Jason Moran: I come from a line of musicians that I’ve studied with that have not taken the obvious approach to things and are a bit progressive in their personality, especially within music. That has always interested me even as a teenager listening to Thelonious Monk. They know and they treat tradition with respect and know how to alter it to make it contemporary, and that’s what I’ve learned how to do and what I continue to do.

When you heard the news that you had won a MacArthur Foundation Grant how did you react?

I’m a musician and I always live basically from gig to gig, teaching to teaching, and then I come home and I’m with my family. As a part of being a performer, you gig a lot. That’s where I learned a lot as a performer; as I performed in front of audiences around the world, and it’s a great benefit and a great luxury because I learned what works for me and what works for audiences. But I can stand to have some more time to get back into studying. Now with this grant, I don’t have to feel like I would have to be gigging so constantly and performing so constantly on the road. I could actually take a couple of weeks or a month off and really figure out a step that the band or my music could take. Or another step that we can take spiritually that might or might not affect the music.

Do you feel pressure in winning this grant? It is, after all, nicknamed the “genius grant.”

I like the pressure to be a better performer, and I deal with that every time I play the piano. I actually enjoy that kind of feeling. I don’t attach anything to the genius part, but I just know as a musician it’s difficult to get better at playing the instrument. So for me it’s extremely hard, which means I have to practice. I have more practicing to do, which is part of what has gotten me here today, so I can’t stop doing anything. I’m a little restless so I have to keep going.

How do you think the money will change your schedule of performing versus writing new music?

For me, it’s more just investigating things that may or may not affect the music. No musicians can really predict what the outcome will be of their passion or their hobby on their music. I mean if you eat a bad meal, it affects the music as much as the music you’ve learned in your life. All of these things about life actually shift my understanding of my craft, so I always want to put a few bumps in my road, a few places where’ll be able to study something specifically and then let those ideas marinate for eight or ten years before they actually manifest themselves because that’s what’s kind of happened in my life thus far. I don’t want to put the pressure on looking for results; I just want to look for the information now.

Out of all of instruments and ideas that you can work with, how did you fall into or choose jazz?

I don’t know if I chose it. It sounds corny but it chose me. Jazz for me exists in a place where once you get to the point and ability with your instrument — for me it’s the piano — jazz offers this freedom to not only use my technique as a pianist but use my technique as a human. How I interact with people, how I lead a discussion, how I listen, all of these things come into play as a jazz musician. It’s a spur of the moment kind of performing, and when I watch and listen to great musicians perform it’s watching their brains work at an unbelievable rate. It’s not really like physical, like football or anything with people making split decisions, but it’s a finesse. Their decisions and emotions come through sound. Jazz for me offers cultural complexities and American complexity; it offers many of these layers, which feed my palette.

What do you think is the juxtaposition between jazz music and American music?

America has a kind of love/hate relationship with culture. What I’d like to do is move jazz and my performances into spaces I’ve never been before. I’ve never been to many states throughout America, and I know that there was a particular discouragement for older musicians in the 30s, 40s, 50s about going to the South to perform because they wouldn’t have any hotels to stay in, they’d have to stay in people’s houses. There are musicians in the South but I’d like to bring this music back down there and I’d like to perform there. I’d like to perform in rural Alabama – I have a piece that was created about the quilters from Gee’s Bend, Alabama and we performed it at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and we also performed it in Belgium, but wow, what do you think about taking it back down to Gee’s Bend, Alabama?

Do you think jazz is a dying musical style?

It’s never been dead, and most people who say that jazz is dead have dead minds. It’s the same people who say painting is dead or silly things like opera is dead. Culture comes in waves and you can’t predict when or where that energy will come from. But over the years I’ve experienced this great support system within the jazz community from older musicians to younger musicians to pull the flame ahead and that’s a really powerful one culturally for me and I don’t ever want to put that torch down. I stand with hundreds and thousand of other jazz musicians who think it’s a valid and viable form of expression, just as much as politicians think that caring for their people within their state is a worthy thing to stand for. We all have these things that we stand for and hope that they help one another, and that’s where I stand with my music.